Preamble

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When it’s a choice between writing the story
and writing the myth, write the myth.
—John Ford

Twenty-five years ago when in the company of foreign journalists visiting New York, I could count on their remarks about the American love affair with crime to strike a tone that was condescending and amused. So exciting, the wild American West; so many new and noteworthy killings listed daily in the tabloid press; so many felons to the manor born departing the courthouse with a book deal instead of a conviction, on their way to lunch with Barbara Walters or reelection to a seat in Congress. Gatherings sponsored by one of the city’s publishers or literary agents seldom failed to turn up a French film critic comparing Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather movies to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, or a German novelist wondering where one might walk out of an evening in Harlem to hear the music of violence in the voices and in the streets.

Times have changed, and with them the attitude of the travelers from abroad. The conversations have moved uptown, from restaurants in SoHo to U.N. conference rooms, where most of those present have in mind the exploits of the lawless Bush administration, the snapshots taken at Abu Ghraib, and the pillage of the Wall Street banks. Concerned with the survival of something that can be recognized as Western civilization, they ask why the FBI doesn’t seal with yellow crime-scene tape the entrances to Citigroup and the New York Stock Exchange, why the reluctance on the part of the American intelligence services to renounce their faith in torture, why the interest rates charged by the credit-card companies on a par with the ones imposed by the associates of Tony Soprano? Despite the never-ending wars on crime waged by the producers of Law & Order and CSI, why does the murder rate in the United States dwarf the comparative statistics in all of Western Europe and most of Asia?

The sharper points on the questions suggest that from the foreign point of view, the American fondness for the dressing up of crime in the costumes of romance begins to be seen as an amusement priced at too high a production cost—note the documents being passed around the table referring to the $4 trillion capitalization of the war in Iraq and the $7.7 trillion write-down of the subprime mortgage bubble. The numbers speak to the suspicion that the American way of life—to the extent that it depends on the casting of the outlaw as the hero of the tale—is not the best of all possible ways into the near or distant future.

Together with President Barack Obama, I don’t doubt the need for a change in moral policy, but to worry about winning or losing the wars on crime is to miss the point. It’s enough that they should be ongoing, and for answers to the wonderings why, to read the handwriting on the walls of the news and entertainment media and follow the gunplay around the continuous loop of war movie and police drama that secures the perimeter of the national dream of Eden. As per the rule of thumb laid down by John Ford, the Hollywood director best remembered for the movie Stagecoach, the myth is where the game is at, where Veronica Lake and the Sundance Kid team up with Teddy Roosevelt and the perps who gave the Boston Tea Party to drive the wagons west to Oregon, changing horses in Fort Laramie under John Wayne’s cottonwood trees, sometimes heading south for Sunset Boulevard in company with Philip Marlowe on the bobtailed nag, Ronald Reagan on the bay.

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